The Prime Minister was cheered as he entered the room before showing what was said to be a rare degree of emotion in a meeting which was designed to allow a show of strength from those loyal to him.
Labour peer Lord Foulkes told journalists as he left the meeting that there had been “great support for Gordon”
Christian leaders outside the Episcopal Church said the church’s handling of Thew Forrester has implications beyond the denomination.
“If a so-called bishop does not agree with the central elements of the Christian faith, then he should not call himself a Christian, let alone a bishop””nor should a church ordain him. He is an apostate from the Faith; and a church that ordains such a one is also apostate,” said George O. Wood, general superintendent of the Assemblies of God.
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler agrees.
“The difference between orthodoxy and heresy is of vital importance to every evangelical believer,” he said. “We should feel grief and pain whenever we see a church that is involved in this kind of basic theological turmoil and where we hear the truth of the gospel denied, because it compromises the gospel witness of Christians around the world.”
In the city of Greensboro, N.C., there’s a program designed for teenage mothers. To prevent these teens from having another child, the city offers each of them $1 a day for every day they are not pregnant. It turns out that the psychological power of that small daily payment is huge. A single dollar a day is enough to push the rate of teen pregnancy down, saving all the incredible costs ”” human and financial ”” that go with teen parenting.
Cass Sunstein, President Obama’s pick to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, is a vocal supporter of the program, because it’s an economic policy that shapes itself around human psychology. Sunstein is just one of a number of high-level appointees now working in the Obama administration who favors this kind of approach.
After outmaneuvering what amounted to an attempted coup last week by members of his own cabinet, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, confronted disastrous European election results Monday that could amplify calls within his party for his ouster.
With nearly all the votes counted, Mr. Brown’s Labor Party was beaten into a humiliating third place behind the small, euroskeptic United Kingdom Independence Party and the opposition Conservatives in first place.
David Cameron, the Conservative leader, said the vote showed a “desperately weak and divided government” locked with its internal adversaries in a “slow dance of political death.”
Statistically, there are few surprises in the 2009 Official Catholic Directory.
The number of patients served in Catholic hospitals and the number of clients assisted by Catholic charitable agencies went up. Fewer baptisms, first Communions, confirmations and marriages were performed in Catholic churches last year. The number of Catholic parishes and elementary schools in the U.S. continues to decline.
But here and there, there are signs of hope in the statistical summary that is designed to present a snapshot of what the U.S. Catholic Church looked like on Jan. 1, 2009.
The totals for priests, permanent deacons and diocesan seminarians each experienced a small increase in the 2009 book. There were more students in Catholic colleges and universities; in private, Catholic-run high schools and elementary schools; and in high school religious education programs.
Clergy at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, are opting out of performing civil marriages until gay couples can legally wed–and are encouraging other clergy to do likewise, according to the Rev. Ed Bacon, rector.
“At the heart of Jesus’s moral vision and All Saints’ historic mission is respecting the dignity of every human being,” Bacon said in a June 3 press release announcing the decision, which is effective immediately.
“The California Supreme Court in its recent opinion has ruled that those of same-gender affections are second-class citizens,” Bacon added. “Denying fundamental rights to a certain classification of humanity is blatant discrimination with which our governing board, the other clergy of All Saints, and I will not participate. We invite other clergy and congregations to join us in this stand for marriage equality.”
Editor’s Note:Bishop Robert Duncan, Bishop of Pittsburgh and moderator of the Common Cause Partnership gives his view on the proposed Constitution and Canons of the Anglican Church in North America
How do we renew what was best about the tradition that produced us? How do we not repeat the patterns that subverted our life as a biblical and missionary province? How do we adapt learnings from the vibrant newer branches of the Anglican Communion? How do we restore our role as the bridge among and between the various denominational expressions of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church? How do we have both freedom and accountability? How can we be truly catholic, truly evangelical, truly charismatic and truly conciliar in a 21st century context ”“ both North American and global? These are all questions that shaped the deliberations of the Governance Task Force, and the wider consultations the Governance Task Force undertook, and that resulted in the Constitution and Canons proposed for ratification at the inaugural Provincial Assembly of the Anglican Church in North America.
The Constitution and Canons go much further than anyone imagined possible just a year ago….
For the past five years, Ernie DiGiacomo has been able to count on parents to guarantee the $1,500 to $2,500 rents he charges for the 15 apartments he owns in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. When he called renters who had missed payments, he often heard, “My parents will send you a check.”
But in the past six months, the parents are pulling back financial help, he said, and as a result, he has watched more renters move out.
“Most of them are moving back with parents,” Mr. DiGiacomo said.
President Obama was getting his daily economic briefing one recent morning when a fly distracted him. The president swatted and missed, just as the pest buzzed near the shoes of Lawrence H. Summers, the chief White House economic adviser. “Couldn’t you aim a little higher?” deadpanned Christina D. Romer, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
Mrs. Romer was joking, she said in an interview, adding, “There are only a few times that I felt like smacking Larry.” Yet few laughed in the president’s presence.
If the Oval Office incident was meant as a lighthearted moment, it also exposed the underlying tensions that have gripped Mr. Obama’s economic advisers as they have struggled with the gravest financial crisis since the Depression, according to several dozen interviews with administration officials and others familiar with the internal debates.
LAUGHTER may be the best medicine, but God is no joke, according to an Anglican bishop who has chided Christian church leaders who think of themselves as stand-up comedians and resort to making jokes during sermons.
The Bishop of South Sydney, Robert Forsyth, says there is nothing funny in “lame-fisted attempts” to crack jokes and be funny during services and church meetings. Humour has its place, but God and church, he says, is no laughing matter.
“I am frankly sick of ‘leaders’ ruining the atmosphere of the meeting/service and disrupting the focus on God with half-baked comic lines,” he wrote for a Sydney Anglican online ministry resource guide. “Or they detract from my reflection upon some important point made in the sermon with smart cracks or attempts to make funny comments about the preacher or the sermon.”
In general, the four dissident Anglican congregations argue in their 44-page submission that B.C.’s civil court should give them the right to continue worshipping in the Anglican buildings because they are remaining in “communion” with the wider Anglican church.
In the end, Justice Kelleher is being asked to rule on a moral, religious and ecclesiastical dispute that has for several decades drawn much emotional energy from both conservative and liberal Anglicans.
A three-week trial is underway in Vancouver that will determine who gets the keys to St. Matthew’s Anglican Church in Abbotsford ”“ the Diocese of New Westminster, or the local congregation.
In February 2008 the church voted ”“ by a majority of 186 to four ”“ to break away from the Anglican Church of Canada over the issue of same-sex blessings.
Linda Seale of Abbotsford is a St. Matthew’s trustee, and was the only local person to testify.
If Judge Sonia Sotomayor joins Justice Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, they may find that they have far more than a job title in common.
Both come from the humblest of beginnings. Both were members of the first sizable generation of minority students at elite colleges and then Yale Law School. Both benefited from affirmative action policies.
But that is where their similarities end, and their disagreements begin. For the first time, the Supreme Court would include two minority judges, but ones who stand at opposite poles of thinking about race, identity and opportunity. Judge Sotomayor and Justice Thomas have walked parallel paths and yet arrived at contrary conclusions, not only on legal questions, but on personal ones, too.
Judge Sotomayor celebrates being Latina, calling it a reason for her success; Justice Thomas bristles at attempts to define him by race and says he has succeeded despite the obstacles it posed. Being a woman of Puerto Rican descent is rich and fulfilling, Judge Sotomayor says, while Justice Thomas calls being a black man in America a largely searing experience. Off the bench, Judge Sotomayor has helped build affirmative action programs. On the bench, Justice Thomas has argued against them with thunderous force.
Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s New York Times.
Why hasn’t President Obama insisted on public hearings over what happened during this financial crisis?
Not a single top executive of a Wall Street securities firm responsible for causing the financial crisis has had the courage or the decency to step forward in front of the cameras and explain to the American people in his own words exactly how and why he allowed his firm to cause the crisis. Both Mr. Fuld and Alan Schwartz, the chief executive of Bear Stearns at the end, in their Congressional testimony blamed the proverbial once-in-a-century financial tsunami. Do they or any of their peers really think this is true?
There may be a way to find out. There is much talk nowadays coming from top bankers ”” Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Jamie Dimon of JPMorganChase, John Mack of Morgan Stanley and even Ken Lewis of Bank of America ”” about seeing how quickly they can repay to the Treasury the TARP money Mr. Paulson forced on them. One precondition of their being allowed to repay the funds should be a requirement that each gives a public deposition and explains, under oath, what truly happened and why.
This piece was given an astonishing full page on yesterday’s New York Times op-ed page. Read it all.
What’s the policy lesson from these three success stories?
It’s that the most decisive weapons in the war on poverty aren’t transfer payments but education, education, education. For at-risk households, that starts with social workers making visits to encourage such basic practices as talking to children. One study found that a child of professionals (disproportionately white) has heard about 30 million words spoken by age 3; a black child raised on welfare has heard only 10 million words, leaving that child at a disadvantage in school.
The next step is intensive early childhood programs, followed by improved elementary and high schools, and programs to defray college costs.
Perhaps the larger lesson is a very empowering one: success depends less on intellectual endowment than on perseverance and drive. As Professor Nisbett puts it, “Intelligence and academic achievement are very much under people’s control.”
Fordlandia isn’t just the story of a plantation; it’s a story about Ford’s ego. As disaster after disaster struck, Ford continued to pour money into the project. Not one drop of latex from Fordlandia ever made it into a Ford car.
But the more it failed, the more Ford justified the project in idealistic terms. “It increasingly was justified as a work of civilization, or as a sociological experiment,” Grandin says. One newspaper article even reported that Ford’s intent wasn’t just to cultivate rubber, but to cultivate workers and human beings.
In the end, Ford’s utopia failed. Fordlandia’s residents, ever in hope their patriarch would someday visit their Midwestern industrial town in the middle of the jungle, gave up and left.
These days, Fordlandia is quite beautiful, Grandin says. The “American” town where the managers and administrators lived is abandoned and overgrown. Weeds grow over the American-style bungalows, and bats roost in the rafters, and little red fire hydrants sit covered in vines.
But Mr. Obama has grown concerned that he is losing the debate over certain policy prescriptions he favors, like a government-run insurance plan to compete with the private sector, said one Democrat familiar with his thinking. With Congress beginning a burst of work on the measure, top advisers say, the president is determined to make certain the final bill bears his stamp.
“If they hadn’t come, where would we be today?’ said [Louis] Delevin, 77, who as a farm boy of 12 provided the pilots with apple cider between raids on the retreating German troops. “You don’t have to be a great scholar to understand that the freedom we enjoy today was decided in those days in 1944.”
261 The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of the Christian faith and of Christian life. God alone can make it known to us by revealing himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
262 The Incarnation of God’s Son reveals that God is the eternal Father and that the Son is consubstantial with the Father, which means that, in the Father and with the Father the Son is one and the same God.
263 The mission of the Holy Spirit, sent by the Father in the name of the Son (Jn 14:26) and by the Son “from the Father” (Jn 15:26), reveals that, with them, the Spirit is one and the same God. “With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified” (Nicene Creed).
264 “The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father as the first principle and, by the eternal gift of this to the Son, from the communion of both the Father and the Son” (St. Augustine, De Trin. 15, 26, 47: PL 42, 1095).
265 By the grace of Baptism “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”, we are called to share in the life of the Blessed Trinity, here on earth in the obscurity of faith, and after death in eternal light (cf. Paul VI, CPG § 9).
266 “Now this is the Catholic faith: We worship one God in the Trinity and the Trinity in unity, without either confusing the persons or dividing the substance; for the person of the Father is one, the Son’s is another, the Holy Spirit’s another; but the Godhead of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is one, their glory equal, their majesty coeternal” (Athanasian Creed: DS 75; ND 16).
267 Inseparable in what they are, the divine persons are also inseparable in what they do. But within the single divine operation each shows forth what is proper to him in the Trinity, especially in the divine missions of the Son’s Incarnation and the gift of the Holy Spirit.
–The Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church
Father,
You sent your Word to bring us truth
and your Spirit to make us holy.
Through them we come to know the mystery of your life.
Help us to worship you, one God in three persons,
You reveal yourself in the depths of our being,
by proclaiming and living our faith in you.
Grant this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God for ever and ever. Amen
Almighty and everlasting God,
you have given to us you servants grace,
by the confession of a true faith,
to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity,
and in the power of your divine Majesty
to worship the Unity:
Keep us steadfast in this faith and worship,
and bring us at last
to see you in your one and eternal glory, O Father;
who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Praise the LORD! Praise the LORD, O my soul! I will praise the LORD as long as I live; I will sing praises to my God while I have being.
–Psalm 146:1-2
Here is one:
For as long as I can remember, my Muslim identity and my American identity have made me a stranger in both worlds.
In the sensitivities of the post- 9/11 era, I had to be cautious when asserting my Muslim identity to my fellow Americans who were not Muslim. When visiting cousins in Pakistan, I had to be cautious asserting my pride in being an American.
Today, I have never been so proud to be a Muslim-American. Thank you, President Obama, for bringing our two worlds together, and for helping me merge the worlds within myself.
Moein Khawaja
Philadelphia
Forty-five years ago, Alyssa Stanton was born into an African-American, Pentecostal family in Cleveland. On Saturday, Ms. Stanton is to become a rabbi ”” the first African-American woman to be ordained as a rabbi by a mainstream Jewish seminary, said Jonathan D. Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University.
Ms. Stanton is scheduled to assume the leadership of an overwhelmingly white synagogue in Greenville, N.C., in August. In interviews, many observers drew parallels between her joining the rabbinate and November’s presidential result.
“It is of incredible importance to note that her ordination coincides with the election of Barack Obama,” said Rabbi David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College, who will ordain Ms. Stanton at the college’s Cincinnati campus on Saturday. “It offers a ray of hope that the world can become a better place.”
Deidre Murphy: I’m Deidre Murphy. I live in Blythewood, S.C. and I’m 47. I was in marketing. I was making, gosh with benefits and everything and with bonus, about $95,000. I got $326 a week, which is the absolute maximum in South Carolina. If I cobbled all four of those checks together, I could pay my mortgage. I have zero savings left. I did everything I could to pay my mortgage, to protect my credit and now that I’ve been unemployed for so long, I’m not eligible for any of these wonderful mortgage programs. So yeah, I’m a little angry, to be perfectly honest.
You know, I didn’t feel like it was my fault that I got laid off at all. It had nothing to do with my job performance. My ego started taking a hit, when I started getting rejected everywhere I was looking for a job. I would either hear nothing or I’d get an actually rejection. Then you start hearing every week the numbers of who was getting laid off and then, I’m talking to all these people, everybody I know knows somebody who’s been laid off.
Clorene Jones: I’m Clorene Jones, Greensboro, S.C. I worked in a weave mill for 46 years. Last March of 2008, the place that I worked closed down. Hadn’t worked too long. I hadn’t been back to work, but not quite a year, but I did get some unemployment, $193 a week. And then I’ve drawn up Social Security too, that helps.
Well I had a job to go to another plant, but when I went, because I didn’t have a GED or a diploma, they wouldn’t hire me. I finished the 10th grade when I was going to school. Well some of it I find hard, especially the algebra part of it. I wasn’t too good in school, it’s real hard.
There are one million more Catholics in the United States than the previous year, the 2009 Official Catholic Directory statistics indicate.
A press release from the U.S. Catholic bishops’ conference affirmed Wednesday that the total number of Catholics in the country equals 68,115,001, or 22% of the population.
Tess Vigeland:….Today we’re starting with the question of why and how we became this nation of borrowers and exactly when debt lost its social stigma.
Dave Ramsey: It’s roots are in the 70s, when debt became a product that was marketed by some of the most masterful marketing minds that the planet has ever known. The selling of debt as an absolute necessity to live, is really one of the most masterful marketing jobs in the history of the world. We live in the most marketed culture in the world and the most money and the most sophistication used to sell any product, is used by the banking industry.
The credit card people have done a phenomenal job of integrating their product line into our psyche to where we truly believe that we can’t live without it. That’s amazing marketing. THat began in the 70s. It took deep roots in the 80s and by the 90s we were seeing five and six billion credit card offers a year going out to where, dead people and dogs were issued on a regular basis.